[SFGate.com]
There are only two real options. One is to hold tight to the leaky life raft of inflexible ideology (hello, organized religion), to rules and laws and codes of conduct written by the fearful, for the fearful, to live in constant low-level dread of all the extraordinary changes and radical rethinkings of what it means to be human or animal or male or female or hetero or homo or any other swell little label you thought was solid and trustworthy but which is increasingly proven to be blurry and unpredictable and just a little dangerous.

There is another option. You can choose nimbleness, lightness, a sly and knowing grin...You can refuse to let your brain, your soul lock down into one way of looking at the world...

[globeandmail.com]
Does vocabulary matter?

[PC World]
PC World recommends 100 blogs.

[Oliver Kamm]
Oliver Kamm on the new uproar over Salman Rushdie: The notion that free speech, while important, needs to be held in balance with the avoidance of offence is question-begging, because it assumes that offence is something to be avoided. Free speech does indeed cause hurt—but there is nothing wrong in this. Knowledge advances through the destruction of bad ideas. Mockery and derision are among the most powerful tools in that process...It is inevitable that those who find their deepest convictions mocked will be offended...But they are not entitled to protection, still less restitution, in the public sphere, even for crass and gross sentiments. A free society does not legislate in the realm of beliefs; by extension, it must not concern itself either with the state of its citizens’ sensibilities. If it did, there would in principle be no limit to the powers of the state, even into the private realm of thought and feeling.

[ICMPA]
The Libby, Enron and Arthur Andersen cases have all put the issue of "transparency" in the forefront of the news. But how transparent are the media themselves? A new study shows how various media outlets scored.

[Business Week]
What are people doing online, at what age?

[Society for Historical Archaeology]
Historic Glass Bottle Identification & Information Website.

[Silliman's Blog]
Ron Silliman: ...in the late 1940s, America was a nation of 150 million people, with an annual total of 8,000 book titles per year of all types and something under 200 publishing poets who were active enough to generate books. Today, the United States has twice as many people, but is now publishing over 290,000 book titles per year, of which some 4,000 titles alone are poetry. There must be somewhere between ten and twelve thousand publishing poets in the U.S. today in contrast with 200 fifty years ago. In the 1940s, there was one publishing poet for every 750,000 Americans. Today, there is one for every 25,000.

[National Geographic]
Adventure Magazine's list of "The 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time" (surely Burton and Halliburton should rate higher rankings!).

[Comment is free]
Sue Blackmore: Faith is corrosive to the human mind. If someone genuinely believes that it is right to believe things without reason or evidence then they are open to every kind of dogma, whim, coercion, or dangerous infectious idea that's around. If someone is convinced that it is acceptable to base their beliefs on what is written in an ancient book, or what some teacher tells them they must believe, then they will have no true freedom of thought; they will be trapped by their faith into inconsistency and untruths because they are unable to throw out false ideas when evidence against them comes along.

[ZNet|Culture]
Martin Espada gives a stirring commencement speech on "The Republic of Poetry": In the Republic of Poetry there is no war, because phrases like “weapons of mass destruction,” “shock and awe,” “collateral damage” and “surge” are nothing but clichés, bad poetry by bad poets, and no one believes them. They bleed language of its meaning, drain the blood from words. You, the next generation, must reconcile language with meaning, restore the blood to words, and end this war.

[Locus Online]
Cory Doctorow on fanfic: Culture is a lot older than art—that is, we have had social storytelling for a lot longer than we've had a notional class of artistes whose creativity is privileged and elevated to the numinous, far above the everyday creativity of a kid who knows that she can paint and draw, tell a story and sing a song, sculpt and invent a game. To call this a moral failing—and a new moral failing at that!—is to turn your back on millions of years of human history. It's no failing that we internalize the stories we love, that we rework them to suit our minds better.

[The Wall Street Journal]
Are you ready to outsource all the little tasks of your life?